As part of my promotion attempts in the lead up to the transition between University and employment, I have decided to promote myself and my work on various social media. I have chosen to concentrate my efforts on LinkedIn and Twitter as they both have a mix of public outreach and pool of professional people.
For LinkedIn I went through all possible contacts, adding people I have worked with in the past as well as following relevant companies. This action didn't yield much success to begin with but eventually led to someone I added recommencing me for a job at a friends agency in London, making it a very successful activity.
For Twitter I went a slightly different route because of the colossal volume of people on there. After noticing how Twitter recommends followers to people based on mutual follows of people in your network, I decided the most effective way to gain exposure was to follow companies or large profiles that had many shared followers. After following Wired Sussex, Capacitor Creative and Bite Global, I managed to get a total of 16 people and companies in the creative and digital fields without having to follow them first. This was a massive change from the previous 2 that had followed me in the 3 years I've had my Twitter account.
A strange side effect of this was getting followed by 5 different video production companies on Instagram. I think this was down to me posting photos of me doing film work to my Twitter via Instagram. Although I didn't initially target Instagram I'm happy to have a more professional following on there.